courtesy NASA
If anyone wanted to find an excuse to celebrate this weekend, NASA might just have handed them the reason.
Nasa had just announced that a new asteroid, named 2012 DA14, is to make the closest fly by to date.
The asteroid, discovered in Spain last year, is only 150 feet, and will zip by by at approximately 17,000 distance.
That, considering the earth's diameter is a little over 22,000 miles, make a lot people squeamish. However, NASA scientist have declared that the asteroid will not impact the earth and that the calculated probability is zero.
Even the satellites orbiting the earth seem to have little of no chance of an encounter with the rock.
The rock, although seemingly small, if it would impact the earth, would produce a force equal to 2.2 million tons of TNT. The explosion would wreak damage similar to the scale observed in the Tunguska incident of 1908.
The Asteroid is being closely monitored by the Near EArth program at NASA and it is a further chance to study an object at such a close range.
Source: NASA
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